Black pepper (Piper nigrum) is a flowering vine native to southern India and its use dates back to the second millennium BCE.

Piper nigrum peppercorns.

The green peppercorns gradually turn red as they ripen on the vine, but black peppers are made by drying the green unripe peppercorns (ideally harvested just as they start to turn orange/red in colour), after brief fermenting. Fresh green peppercorns are commonly used in cooking in some parts of Southeast Asia. White pepper, incidentally, is from the same peppercorns but comprises just the seed of the fully ripe fruit with the dark-coloured skin removed (after soaking for ten days), though the flavour is different, being less complex and less pungent.

Pepper was used in Ancient Egypt for ritual and medicinal purposes. Black peppercorns were found inserted in the nostrils of Rameses II (d. 1213 BCE) as part of the embalming process. Pepper was used in Ancient Greece, but mainly for medicinal reasons. Hippocrates (c. 400 BCE) advised on using pepper in several medical preparations. He advised, as a remedy for tetanus, ‘Give him pills of pepper and black hellebore [a toxic purgative of the buttercup family], and warm fat bird soup’; pleurisy, ‘give him in the fasting state five corns of pepper, silphium juice to the amount of a bean, honey, vinegar and water to drink warm’; and to help breathing and expectoration, ‘mix a good pinch of capers, pepper, and a little soda into honey, vinegar and water; administer warm’.¹ It was also employed in a treatment for pneumonia.² Hippocrates also used pepper for gynaecological treatments and referred to its Indian origin.³ L. M. V. Totelin commented that the Greeks learned the word ‘peperi’ from the Persians, who may have been middlemen in the trade, and may also have learned its usage from them.⁴

Two varieties of pepper were described by Theophrastus (d.

One of the earliest Roman pepper finds was the fourth- to second-century BCE occurrence in the House of Hercules’ Wedding in Pompeii.⁸ In the third and second centuries BCE, pepper started to become more widely available, probably via trade with Arabs as Rome expanded its territory. This increased dramatically in the early Imperial era as Egypt and the Red Sea came under Roman control and merchants imported pepper from India. In the late first century BCE, the poet Horace, who lived through the transition from Republic to Empire, made numerous references to the culinary use of pepper.⁹ Ovid (d. 18 CE) also wrote about pepper in the context of an aphrodisiac:

they mingle pepper with the seed of the stinging nettle … But the Goddess, whom the lofty Eryx receives beneath his shady hill, does not allow us to be impelled in such manner to her delights.¹⁰

Pepper was the most important seasoning for Romans according to Apicius, the first-century CE gourmet and compiler of recipes – it is used in 76 per cent of nearly 500 dishes described in De Re Coquinaria and was used in cooking and as a condiment.¹¹ Huge quantities were imported from southern India via the Red Sea–Egypt and Persian Gulf routes.¹² The south-west and northeast monsoon winds were exploited to make outbound and return voyages by sea (of course, it wasn’t just pepper that was transported and traded but a huge variety of goods, though black pepper was chief among spices and aromatics).

It is quite surprising that the use of pepper has come so much into fashion, seeing that in other substances which we use, it is sometimes their sweetness, and sometimes their appearance that has attracted our notice; whereas pepper has nothing in it that can plead as a recommendation to either fruit or berry, its only desirable quality being a certain pungency; and yet it is for this that we import it all the way from India!¹³

Marcus Valerius Martialis, better known as Martial (38–104 CE), was a Roman poet who became famous for his acerbic prose and cutting, often lewd, wit, usually directed at the excesses and foibles of his fellow men and as a general commentary on city life. The subject of pepper did not escape his attention – he quipped on the cost of pepper:

But, ah! my cook will consume a vast heap of pepper, and will have to add Falernian wine to the mysterious sauce. No; return to your master, ruinous wild-boar: my kitchen fire is not for such as you; I hunger for less costly delicacies.¹⁴

But he recognised its utility in spicing up dull food: ‘That insipid beet, the food of artisans, may acquire some flavour, how often must the cook have recourse to wine and pepper!’¹⁵

The medicinal use of pepper also continued with the Romans, as exemplified by Celsus in the first-century CE De Medicina, who used it in various remedies – and he may have been the first to write about pepper’s ability to make people sneeze.¹⁶ He also wrote of a cream to treat infections and ease painful joints – it contained ‘pepper both round and long’, and a bewildering array of other exotic spices. Dioscorides too described it primarily for its medicinal values – well, he was writing a medical text after all – but he did also refer to its pungency and flavour: black pepper was sweeter and sharper than white, more pleasant tasting and more aromatic.¹⁷

Archaeobotanical evidence from the Roman Empire includes peppercorns found in the Cardo V sewer at Herculaneum, which pre-dates the 79 CE eruption of Vesuvius, and from an early second-century CE septic pit at Roman Mursa, Croatia.¹⁸

Black peppercorns have also been found in Roman sites in Germany, France and Britain, where waterlogged anaerobic conditions have helped preserve them.

Several lines of evidence point to its common usage, not just by the wealthy. Pepper was exported from the ports of the Malabar coast of south-west India (e.g. from the lost port of Muziris, somewhere near Cochin) as it was grown nearby. A passage from Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana, written in the second or third century CE, described how a tribe of monkeys harvested the inaccessible pepper-bearing trees which grew in precipices, dumping them in clearings around the trees, and that they had learned this by imitating the Indians who picked the fruit from trees lower down.²⁰ Federico De Romanis reinterprets this rather curious story, with the collectors most probably being local hill people.²¹ A postscript to this theme appeared in the BBC news in July 2020 – PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) claimed that pig-tailed macaques in Thailand are snatched from the wild and trained to pick up to 1,000 coconuts per day, leading several supermarkets to boycott these products.

Although documentary evidence is scarce, there is a mid-second-century CE description of the cargo for a ship called the Hermapollon: De Romanis attempted a reconstruction and interpreted the ship to have a capacity of about 625 tons, of which the black pepper cargo used up 544 tons and that the value of the pepper was around two-thirds of the entire cargo. If this is correct, it emphasises the massive volumes of pepper being imported to Rome. The volume of pepper coming to Rome was so great that warehouses called Horrea Piperataria were built to store them.

In 408 CE, in the final century of the western empire, such was the value of pepper that it was used to placate the besieging Visigoth King Alaric and deter him from sacking Rome:

After long discussions on both sides, it was at length agreed, that the city should give five thousand pounds of gold, and thirty thousand of silver, four thousand silk robes, three thousand scarlet fleeces, and three thousand pounds of pepper.²²

This was only a temporary respite and Alaric returned to sack the city two years later, and the following decades saw Rome lurch from crisis to crisis before its final collapse.

The Red Sea port of Berenike was abandoned in the sixth century CE and was hidden until the early nineteenth century. Archaeological investigations have identified black peppercorns in their thousands and in over 180 soil samples. Peppercorns have also been found at nearby Myos Hormos.

The Hoxne ‘Empress’ pepper-pot is part of the Hoxne hoard, the largest Roman treasure ever discovered in Britain, found in 1992 by a metal detectorist searching for a Suffolk tenant farmer’s mislaid hammer! The hoard comprises gold and silver coins, silver tableware and jewellery. The Empress pot is a hollow silver vessel designed as a high-status female half-figure with a fourth-century appearance, and was accompanied by three other silver-gilt pepper-pots, all exquisite pieces and on display at the British Museum (Figures 10 and 11). The coins date the hoard to after 407 CE, coinciding with huge instability in Rome and the end of the Roman era in Britain. The pepper-pots emphasise the continued use of exotic spice throughout the empire (among the elite, anyway, and the owners were clearly very wealthy), but the circumstances of the burial can only be guessed at. The dating may suggest a concern of impending catastrophe.